For Pentium II PCs, portables, or anything else you are selling or up against, you need to have the latest info to be able to earn the business of the net-savvy customers I have written about in previous columns.
Will the inevitable headlines screaming about the just-revealed floating point bug in the Intel Pentium II (you know, the one that affects a measly 140 trillion or so possible numerical results) affect its success in the marketplace? Probably not as much as its lackluster performance compared to an AMD K6 does. And nobody wants to bet on the wrong horse. What about the SEC? AGP? Your better-informed customers were wondering about these issues even before Intel's marketing machine geared up for another round of CPU wars.
No matter which side of the battlefield you're on, to arm yourself, I'd recommend checking out the latest info about the bug at http://www.x86.org/, or the benchmarks at http://sysdoc.pair.com/. (This "new" bug also affects the Pentium Pro, as well). Frankly, I think the PII bug will have an insignificant impact on the marketability (i.e., success) of the new chip, and will very likely receive a great deal less negative press than the much-ballyhooed bug in the original Pentiums did. After all, that bug produced results that were much more tangible and Intel was then not so expert at spin-doctoring.
There's a very real chance the market -- or at least the more cynical members of the technology press -- will perceive Intel's move away from the Socket 7 to the SEC connector as more of a marketing ploy than a technological advance. If, however, Intel does what it has done so often in the past and moves quickly to exceed the performance of its competitors, then we are likely to see a repeat of the company's '95 - '96 performance. Frequently, Intel has done an end-run around its competitors by moving quickly to address the issues that the others sought to capitalize upon. Recall the 486SX. Complaints that it was deliberately crippled were probably justified, but when the DX chips and OverDrive strategy fell into place so quickly, the complaints couldn't be heard over the din of the cash registers. Similarly, all those shareholder lawsuits over the original Pentium bug had to be dropped when Intel's stock went up -- !! -- in the aftermath of that debacle.
Next came the fears that the CISC architecture was reaching the end of its performance possibilities. This, as you may recall, was the rallying cry of the PowerPC party. In fact, the PowerPC has not performed as well as early predictions had held, while the Pentium and its successors have outperformed nearly all expectations. (At this writing, Exponential, the maker of the much-ballyhooed 533 MHz PPC chip, has so far been unable to deliver a chip that exceeds 400 MHz and is rumored to be close to losing its financial backers.) Concerns about MMX voltage-compatibility of motherboards fell like patsies when the MMX OverDrive quickly addressed the issue. But, despite Intel's FUD marketing prowess, the K6 is a thorn in its side.
I see tremendous marketability in the K6 on the desktop in the near term. The market has not yet grown tired of high-performance desktop PCs and the K6, in a word, rocks. And the latest Alpha and PowerPC chips are going attract their share of powermongers, too. But whether it's an Intel, AMD, Alpha, or PowerPC chip in the next monster tower on Joe Poweruser's desktop, there are plenty of indicators to suggest that things are just getting rolling. The growth in the PC's credibility -- and the Mac's continued strength -- as a publishing and production graphics platform, as evidenced by the announcements and product releases at the recent Seybold publishing conference in NYC, makes even greater growth in the high end a very strong likelihood. I expect industrial-strength production tools like Adobe Illustrator 7, After Effects and QuarkXpress 4 to be strong sellers on the PC, as they have been over the last few years on the Mac. 3D Studio Max, Lightwave 5 and SoftImage are already turning the high-end 3-D graphics market's ideas of what a PC can do on its ear.
When NT5 is released and gains credibility as a robust production platform -- as it likely will -- I expect the DTP, 3D and digital video market opportunities on the PC to blossom as they never have before. After all, the Mac-centric media is still getting plenty of mileage out of the fact that NT 4 leaves something to be desired in its ease of configuration. But even now, NT is gathering strength in production environments. These people crave multiple CPUs, superfast networks, high-end video subsystems and big-screen monitors, redundant disk arrays, color calibration tools and gobs of RAM. Whether it's NT, MacOS or Unix, they want reliability and performance -- and they can cost-justify it.
Let's say (at least for the sake of my word quota on this article) that everyone who wants a PC already has one or is going to wait for the 1998 models. Another area I see a huge potential in is the portable market. I'm particularly pumped on the possibility that lightweight notebooks will finally make a decent showing. Considering their decidedly lackluster market performance (not to mention reliability) over the past few years, you might disagree, but here's my rationale: People are paranoid. Do you leave your $5000 notebook in the car when you park it? I sure don't, after hearing one too many tales of break-in thefts. A growing number of professionals rely on that data to the level that they are not going to leave it in the car, at the table when they get up for a coffee refill, nor are they going to leave it in the conference room when they go out for a break. The need for -- or at least your ability to sell to the perception of -- portability grows stronger in a paranoid society. Security issues are strong motivators.
Do portables need to have CD-ROMs, floppies, 13-inch screens and the other goodies that are de rigeur in today's big fat multimedia portables? For some yes; others will favor portability, desktop connectivity and battery life more than multimedia geegaws. Presumably, we'll continue to see customers willing to pay a premium for both extremes. (I personally want to carry a PC that resembles a Toshiba Libretto -- a 2.2-pound Pentium portable with a decent keyboard and an active matrix screen.) I see a lot of interested customers around the portable PC sections of all the retailers I visit. I see the mainstream user who already has a desktop computer will make his or her next convincing business case for a portable. I see the sales professionals looking for a portable as a solution for the too-crowded desk, to the need for intelligent resource management, for teleworkers, and as a more manageable replacement for the old desktop PC. This trend is already in full force in Japan. The tsunami is due to hit these shores any time now.
Post new comment